Pentecost

Readings for Today.

Listen to the Sermon.

I love a good after-dinner conversation.  Gathered around the table with friends. Relaxed, with clean feet and full bellies.  When the conversation turns to bigger thoughts about life and the future. Even on a full stomach, we can hear the anxiety and fear in Philip’s voice when he asks Jesus, again, about seeing the Father.  

We know that kind of anxiety and fear – in our every day personal lives, in our uncertain and chaotic world, and in our life as a community of faith.  So much in life brings mixed feelings and unknowns - a new health diagnosis, children moving toward adulthood and independence, the impending big earthquake, and even the arrival of a new vicar.  Things we can prepare for, but not things we can control. And that makes us anxious and fearful, even in anticipation of hopeful outcomes.

Like the disciples, what we really want to know is if we will be OK.  

Maybe we don’t REALLY need a point by point map of the journey forward, but to know if our family, our community will be survive and thrive.  If there will be times of less stress and more rest in our lives sometime in the future.

Echoing Philip, we might like to pin Jesus down and say, “Show us that God is REAL, and we will be satisfied.”  Then we will know everything will be okay.

Jesus answers us, in the same way he answered his first disciples:  ‘The Father will send the Holy Spirit in my name, to teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said.  Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. And it is not any peace like the world can give you. Finally, do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.’  That’s the heart of Jesus’ farewell discourse.

It’s also the perfect introduction AND response to Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost with a sound like a rushing wind and tongues of fire.  Talk about disrupting anything that might have been going on, and an experience that is completely unfamiliar and unbalancing.

That’s the Holy Spirit!  Jesus says the Spirit will be a comforter and an advocate, and so it is when he breathes the spirit of peace on his disciples in the upper room.  But when the Spirit arrives on Pentecost to empower them to share the gospel in every language, with every person on earth, it’s far from comforting.  This is the wild and unpredictable Holy Spirit, the fire of God in each of us.

Pentecost was a Jewish feast of the first fruits of the harvest.  A time for celebrating the bounty of the harvest that had just begun, and was yet to come. An act of faith, since no one really knows how the harvest will end.  Locusts or hail or floods could arrive next week and this bounty today could be the whole harvest for this season. And so, we give thanks to God for all that we have received, and all that we trust is to come.   The arrival of the Holy Spirit in the midst of that celebration of gratitude and faith adds a whole new dimension to possibilities of the harvest.

The Spirit of God arrives with a great noise, and the world is never the same again. God is now actively and obviously at work in our world, doing something new.  God’s people are changed. They, we, are empowered and marked by God for something new.

The details of that new thing, that new future, only God really knows – but the Spirit teaches, reminds and encourages us to continue to preach and share God’s love to the ends of the earth.  The presence of the Spirit of God becomes a defining characteristic of God’s people, one that we celebrate in every baptism as we mark the newly baptized with oil, and we say, “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit, and marked as Christ’s own forever.”  Every single one of us, in our baptism, receives gifts of the Holy Spirit to speak the good news of God’s love and forgiveness in ways that all people can hear and receive.

We are celebrating some of those gifts among us this morning, as we recognize the ministries of people in this congregation to nurture faith in us, and to be diligent and accountable stewards of our congregation’s finances.  Sharing God’s love with us and in our community, so that we grow as individuals and as a community of faith.

The Holy Spirit binds us to God, to all people, and to one another, forever.  It makes us inseparable. It is a bond that cannot be broken. It is also a bond that demands that we respect and honor one another, and God, and ourselves – and that we do so with courage and integrity.  Not as a matter of duty, but as a matter of living fully and deeply into ourselves and into the love of God.

Which brings us back to Pentecost, a feast that celebrates all that we have received, and all that is to come.  As Jesus prepares to leave his disciples, he reminds them that the one constant in a life of many unknowns is the gift of the Holy Spirit.  God’s Spirit remains with us, as a comfort and source of hope and peace. But let us not forget, the Spirit is as unpredictable and dangerous as fire - burning in us, yearning for God, and empowering AND demanding our gifts and voices to preach love, respect, and justice to and for all people.